“Islamists…lack the mental equipment to govern,” New York Times columnist David Brooks writes today (7/5/13). “Incompetence is built into the intellectual DNA of radical Islam.” Now, Brooks has been known to cite eugenicist Steve Sailer on “white fertility rates” (12/7/04; Extra!, 4/05). But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that rather than making a racist argument, he’s simply appearing to be racist as a metaphor (as when he wrote recently that interracial marriage was producing a “nation of mutts”–6/27/13). So he’s saying, then, that Islamists govern as if they were biologically inferior. And his evidence for […]

Ever since the Israeli raid on a Turkish group’s boat filled with aid for the Gaza Strip, there has been a lot of attempts in the press (FAIR Blog, 6/10/10), following Israel’s lead, to label the Turkish humanitarian group IHH a supporter of “terrorism.” The latest salvo comes from a New York Times article (7/15/10) about the Turkish group having “extensive connections with Turkey’s political elite.” The Times reports: On Monday, Germany banned the charity’s offices, citing its support for Hamas, which Germany considers a terrorist organization. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the charity abused donors’ good intentions “to […]

Thomas Friedman sure knows how to flip reality on its head. In his New York Times op-ed column today, Friedman hops on the bandwagon (FAIR blog, 6/10/10) of bashing Turkey for “joining the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran resistance front against Israel.” Friedman accuses Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan of no longer promoting democracy and instead being more focused on “praising Hamas instead of the more responsible Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which is actually building the foundations of a Palestinian state.” Friedman says of Erdogan: I’d love to see him be the most popular leader on the Arab street, but not […]